Anyways, the decisions on abstracts are due today. How’d the review process go?

(By the way, JCMC needs its own RSS feed, not one integrated through SLIS – could you please pass that on?)

I’m a layperson with an interest in how social networking is shaping/reshaping society. As such, I sometimes find academic articles useful, although, frankly, I sometimes find that the scholarly apparatus distracts from a straightforward answer to the question of what does the author think and why does he/she think it, and what hard facts support the viewpoint. Nonetheless, it is often possible to skim an academic article and extract the “heart” of what is actually being said.

My point being, is that I would really like to get a look at the research you have had submitted to you. Now I understand that for various reasons, a lot of these folks are committed to publishing in a Journal environment and would not find other presentations of their work acceptable. Let’s x them out of the picture, for this discussion. We’re then left with some significant number of authors who place a priority on seeing their work exposed effectively to an interested audience and might be willing to consider creative options.

What might these look like?

Well, I don’t know – but you might. I would ask you to, for a moment, take off the hat that labels you as a member of academia with an identification with the Academic culture and its particular customs. Then put on the hat that designates you as one of today’s leading authorities on the subject of how the design of an information system alternately facilitates or restricts the presentation of particular kinds of information, and particular interpersonal interactions related to that information.

There is probably some optimum structure for providing an online venue for the disemmination of research on social networking. But I’m not asking you to find *that* structure. Just an approximation that will be “good enough for now”. Something simple, user-frinedly, and accessible to academics and laypeople alike. It will probably not look like Usenet, Blogger, Wikipedia, MySpace, or a traditional academic journal – although it might conceivably have attributes borrowed from any or all of these.

Why not put something together and invite your rejectees, and others whose work might fit, to host copies of their work there. If that project is beyond your personal resources, I suspect from the activity on this thread that you would find ready collaborators.

I suspect there are potentially wider implications here than just what to do with a hundred high quality rejected papers. Questions like is it time for the next iteration of how research is disseminated, and what might that look like. Questions like we are probably right about now passing the point where the social networking research community is/was small enough that someone in the field can have a good overview of who their colleagues are and what work they are doing. What comes next as that point is passed? And finally, what to my mind is THE question of the online age, how can a person with a thirst for knowledge “drink from the firehose” without bursting. How do we creatively confront the fact that the bandwidth of any individual human is tragically finite? Can we design a better firehose?

(And the complementary question of achieving notice – how to be found as a “needle in a needlestack” as one felow on MySpace put it in a comment on designing his band page).

Just a thought,
-Steve

I will not be making the abstracts public or submitting them to another venue for the authors; this would be inappropriate and unprofessional. I want to offer them alternatives but they have complete control over where their materials go.

For the many articles you won’t fit as full-text in the issue, you can still consider including them in the bibliography. It’d still be a critically considered and organized communication, so you’d probably still have to / want to reject some things.

An earlier comment mentioned including article abstracts, which would be great, space permitting.

I didn’t submit an abstract this time because I didn’t feel my work was ready (and sounds like it’s a good thing because competition is stiff!). But if I *were* to create a publishable piece about – just by way of example – social network sites and linguistic variation, I would rather have that piece in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society, or Journal of Linguistic Anthropology than JCMC or the like. This in no way reflects a negative attitude toward JCMC, but rather a recognition that a) most linguists haven’t heard of JCMC (or NMS etc) and b) I want more linguists to read about CMC work, which means putting it in their journals. I suspect this is probably the case in other disciplines too, though it’s possible that mine may just seem uniquely old-fashioned (but slowly modernizing itself). What you and Nicole specifically could do to facilitate this, I’m not sure, but maybe Paul’s offer above for “journal placement” could do some good.

Also? A big social sciences social network conference! Sounds fantastic! With proceedings!

Also, I just woke up, so I’m sorry if this isn’t the most eloquent.

I don’t know about the quality, but some of your post (and comments) give me more of a head-ache than most papers, seminars and discussion at my university — and I put the same interest in asking the right question there than here. That’s a good sign to me, a very good one.

When I’ve started reading the post that starts with:

> Frankly, one thing that journals do that blogs don’t do is to provide the structure and cycles necessary to refine an argument.

I immediately though: “You guy, you haven’t read danah’s latest paper (Reconstruction’s) about blogs being a medium, not a genre. . .” Then I scrolled down, seen the signature and felt ::Oups::

Then I came to:

> Paul Dourish told me that his favorite reviews are where he’s told that he cited the wrong Dourish or he should go read Dourish.

Well: I don’t know if he enjoys the irony, or the better-than-self insight. But my point is: a blog is what you make of it, so I won’t argue about the name of what you’d ideally have. Let’s consider three aspects: two that were raised, and an third that is key in an academic work pattern.

1. Peer-review, as in “citation suggestions; [...] structural or argument citations; [...] methodological feedback”. This is necessary. The consequence is text (like in First Monday) that are more difficult to read than even the far-above average blog (like this one).

This has to do with nothing but the quality (and length) of your draft: post anything with some sample methodology, and you’ll get me on your back like no-one: a dozen interviewees, two transgendered? How is that representative, even remotely, of any population sample?

If you want to get all that, I’m fine with it: just give us some meat to comment on, and tell us “Now bark: I’m listening”. Though, if you post “Bush is a coward (again)”, I’ll reply “Yeah!” and that will be it.

2. URL, RSS and quotability: by all means! I’ve got RSS feeds for the AER, JEP, JEL (the three leading journals in Economics: one paper in each, and wait for the Nobel) updates twice a year. That day, the printer is hot, I usually buy aspirin, and cancel appointments.

It leaves one question: do you want to make your journal with a paying access? How to pay for bandwidth, and for the referees?

I really think combining these are possible: hey, my blog is like that! What blog? Well, there isn’t any post in it yet, because I haven’t been able to reach anything “that is really flushed through” (Note to non-academics: which is perfectly acceptable as a first-year PhD student). I promise any of the few posts will be with several parts, catchy subtitle, Jstor links… Better than FirstMon. And I have a cool name for it, too.

This actually already exists for a larger scale than myself, and it works well: it’s called ArXiv.org, and for no reason is only for hard-science.

3. Rhythm: that is an issue. All journals have a given number of papers, or pages, often both; most have clear, regular deadlines an publication period. This implies either that a journal publishes the best, say, six papers on the relevant topic of a given period; or that research output are regular, or regulated by referee work. Strong assumption.

CMC, HCI studies have boomed recently (Over a 100 quality submissions? Not in medieval history…) and this challenged the ambiguity between quality work based on a competition, or a threshold. Digital technology allow us to publish it; good referee work is limited — so we have a contradiction here. How to resolve, i. e. how to scale?

Maybe the way out is a very web 2.0-wy “empowering the user” approach (two, actually; well, three):

* either:
- ask every submitter to rate, comment, criticize five or ten papers;
- make the top twenty a temporary referee team, (unable to vote for themselves) and have them work again to discuss and select the top layer of the cream;

* or:
- classify them by sub-field of research (ask MEJ Newman & M Girvan for sorting algorithms for papers, based on their references);
- have them pool their work, discuss & elect the best paper ever in that particular matter;

* or even combine the two:
- classify them by sub-field;
- have them rate in each sub-field the best contributors;
- pool them as a referee team (outside their sub-field) and discussant (inside their sub-field).

And as a sign of good will and a proof blogs can be more than chat and banter, I promise I will sent you a fierce discussion on your last three essays. Including reference, including methodology.

And please, please someone who is a sociologist, of a senior academic, do the same: I’m not going to be the most relevant of all. Sorry.

I’ll buy your argument about blogging’s structural affordances with respect to RSS and its affinity for bite-sized posts. But the other stuff – that people don’t have the time or energy to do rigorous review of blog posts, that bloggers publish rough drafts instead of polished papers – is just artifacts of the historical accident wherein blogging was first popularized as an amateur pursuit. There’s nothing inherent in the medium that prevents people from taking their publishing and reviewing of blogs as seriously as they do with journals. But our concept of “blog” grew out of the concept of a personal journal or diary, rather than, say, an academic journal. People associate blogs with amateurish self-absorption, and that dictates what bloggers do with them. It’s just another example of ideas about an older medium being falsely extended to a new one, like early film being produced as stage-plays or the telephone being used like a fancy telegraph machine. People are beginning to awaken to the affordances of the medium and dissociate the idea of blogging from the historical accident of LiveJournal. Blogs are being taken more seriously every year, and people are figuring out what they’re good for. One of these things is academic discourse. They’re so good for it, in fact, that they will probably displace the journal system. Journals just don’t add enough value to the authors’ actual papers for them to be able to sustain themselves without some kind of external subsidy. This wasn’t true when they held a monopoly on academic publishing, but with self-publishing available to everyone, I don’t think the journal system can justify its existence.

As for my elitism rant: yes, I meant to limit my analysis to academia. I agree with you that no one outside of academia cares about journals or about the politics of academic publishing. But they should. If the mission of the academy is the creation and dispersal of knowledge, then it has failed spectacularly in the second regard. Other institutions have done a much better job than the academy at sharing their expertise and allowing cross-fertilization of different fields of knowledge. And failure to share knowledge means less efficiency in creating new knowledge. Making academic discourse transparent to the world and allowing those outside a given field’s increasingly specialized, myopic focus to provide their input would be two big steps toward keeping the academy relevant. The author-centric nature of blogging also provides a mechanism for scholars to become “stars” without the support of an academic department; this means that people whose scholarship falls outside of (or threatens) the established departments are given a chance to redefine entire fields by shifting the focus of readership.

The reason I’m so up in arms about this probably has a lot to do with the legal academy. It’s a more extreme version of what goes on in other departments, and I think it illustrates where they’re headed: it’s almost completely insulted from the rest of the academy, so its scholarship is uninformed by other fields’ discoveries; publishers are all in bed with Lexis and Thompson/West, two of the sleaziest companies on the face of the earth; and professors get hired based on how well their ideas complement the existing members of the faculty, rather than the actual quality of their scholarship. They have nothing but contempt for their students, who they see as sell-outs; but they themselves aren’t above private practice on the side, and their fiduciary duties to clients get tangled up in their pedagogy all the time, especially in contentious fields. So if I seem particularly harsh toward the faults of academe, you can thank Columbia Law School.

I understand that publicly-available online journals accomplish a lot of what I’m talking about. I just don’t think they do it as effectively. But at any rate, best of luck with the review process. Keep up the good work.

Matt